1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to communications devices and particularly to personal communication devices that maintain profiles of individuals.
2. Related Art
Personal communication devices combine the features of computers and telephones to allow powerful interactions among users. The interactions among users can be solely for communication or for business purposes such as electronic commerce. Optimally, a personal communication device should assist the user in finding and contacting persons and services while also ensuring that the user is contacted, via the personal communication device, only by persons and service providers with whom the user wishes to interact. To accomplish these two goals, some personal communication devices store and utilize profiles of the user and of all other persons or service providers with whom the user interacts.
A profile is information about each user or service provider that is stored in personal communication devices. Profiles enable the personal communication device to determine when and with whom to interact, as well as what requests or offers to make to persons or service providers. Profiles include information such as the addresses at which an entity may be contacted, the times at which different addresses are preferred, and the services that are being offered by the entity. Thus, profiles can be used directly by the user, or the personal communication device can be automated to utilize the profiles to make the above decisions.
Out-of-date profiles lead to erroneous decisions by both the user and the personal communication device. Therefore, it is important to ensure that profiles are kept up-to-date. However, as the number and complexity of profiles used by a single personal communication device increases, the need for a reliable system to keep such profiles up-to-date also increases. The system to keep profiles up-to-date should not put onerous demands on the user or require excessive or unnecessary communication between personal communication devices because personal communication devices may often be disconnected from other personal communication devices or be connected only via expensive or limited bandwidth cellular services.
In the past, profiles have been updated by having the personal communication device keep a log of all persons and/or service providers who have received the user's profile. Then, whenever the user's profile is updated, it is automatically sent to all previous recipients. Each recipient's personal communication device then queries the recipient to determine whether the recipient would like to update the profile. If the recipient approves, the new profile is installed on the recipient's personal communication device.
The prior method of updating user profiles generates a great deal of communication traffic whenever a profile is updated because the profile is automatically sent to every person and service provided who had previously received the profile. The user who forwards the updated profile incurs the cost of this communication. Quite often, this extensive communication is unnecessary because the user whose profile is being updated may no longer have any communication with certain persons or service providers to whom the user had previously sent a profile. Also, the user's dealings with certain other persons and service providers may occur sporadically, such that keeping the user's profile up-to-date is unnecessary. For example, the user may deal with a real estate broker only when the user buys or sells property in the agent's area, and therefore, it is not necessary to continually update profiles between the user and the real estate agent.
Furthermore, before a profile is updated on a recipient's personal communication device, the recipient is asked to approve the update. This causes interruptions to the recipient forcing him or her to decide whether to receive the updated profile. If the user of a personal communication device has a large number of profiles stored in the personal communication device, such interruptions may become so numerous as to constitute a nuisance. Furthermore, if certain persons or service providers do not accept updated profiles, multiple versions of a single user's profile will exist, potentially resulting in unsuitable behavior of the personal communication device.